Governor Synder's Economic Summit (Update: Produces more Questions than Answers reflecting on How the World Has Changed!)

There’s a loss of faith in state’s job market

   With phrases like “skills gap” and “brain drain” often invoked to explain Michigan’s lackluster economy and stagnant incomes, Gov. Rick Snyder is leading a two-day summit at Cobo Center in Detroit this week to wrestle with the talent dilemma.

   After sitting through a few sessions of Day One, the problem seemed apparent to me.

   Call it a confidence gap, a lack of trust, a loss of faith — or maybe just, as Cool Hand Luke once said, “a failure to communicate.”

   We often hear employers complain about inept job candidates or rail about clueless pointy-heads in the education establishment who know nothing about business. A subpar talent pool, they argue, is why Michigan can have a 9% jobless rate and more than 60,000 unfilled jobs at the same time.

   But it was Scott Temple who turned the light bulb on for me Monday about how all key players in the talent game — job-seekers, educators and employers — have had their faith and trust in one another shaken to the core.

   Temple, a 1997 graduate of Detroit Mumford High School and with a history degree from Wayne State University, has peddled pizza behind home plate at Tigers games, led museum and church tours, handled auto insurance and workers compensation claims, and worked at now-defunct Borders Group for three years before jumping ship just ahead of his whole department being eliminated.

   Next stop: an internship with Ford’s human resources department.

   Snyder called up Temple and nine other articulate job-seekers in their 20s or early 30s — all of whom professed a desire to stay in Michigan — to the podium at Cobo on Monday morning.

   The point: Michigan has lots of eager young talent. After their brief remarks, all 10 got hearty applause from the 700 people attending.

   Afterward, though, a conversation with Temple left me wondering whether employers fully grasp what the economic upheaval of the early 21st Century has done to the psyche of today’s work force.

   He was talking about his 44-year-old sister, switching careers from teaching to nursing.

   “She’s seen the landscape change,” he said, “and she’s reinventing herself.

   “That’s just the way of the world now, because you’ll be sitting at your desk and then you’ll hear the word ‘cuts.’

   “And then you hear the words ‘You’re safe.’

   “And then you think, ‘How long?’

   “And then you start (to) get that uncomfortable feeling when you see an empty office next to you or down the hall.”

   What I took away from my chat with Temple — aside from a conviction that I’d hire him in a heartbeat if I had a job to offer — was that the traditional unspoken contract between employer and worker has been shattered, and that everybody in his generation knows it.

   If you come to work every day and perform well, we will take care of you.

   That unspoken promise — the one Temple’s mother trusted through her 41-year career as a schoolteacher and principal in Detroit Public Schools — is history. It’s kaput, just like Borders and scores of other companies that have been vaporized in the age of digital technology and globalization.

   Yes, I suppose there’s a skills gap that today’s teenagers can help close if more choose engineering and technology majors.

   And yes, a denser, cooler, more walkable Detroit might help ease the brain drain from Michigan to cities like Chicago or Boston.

   And yes, our educators can probably do more to understand the needs of businesses that are creating jobs today.

   Equally important, though, is the need for business leaders and hiring managers to fully grasp that the old employment contract is kaput — and that they’d better craft an attractive replacement rationale if they hope to recruit and retain the talent they need.

   If business can no longer promise lifetime employment and security — and obviously it can’t — it must understand the paranoia prevalent in the potential hiring pool when phrases like “disruptive technology” are celebrated in today’s economy of Facebook and Twitter and Buzzfeed.

Scott Temple

TOM WALSH TALKS WITH ASUMMIT PARTICIPANT